Sudan welcomes human rights inspectors

Khartoum- Sudan (PANA) -- Authorities in Khartoum Saturday welcomed a visiting team from the UN Higher Commission for Human Rights to "freely visit any area in the region of Darfur at any time and meet anyone it deems necessary".
"The committee is free to go anywhere in the region.
And whatever the outcome of their tour, they will find that Sudan has nothing to hide," foreign minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told a press briefing here Saturday.
A fact-finding UN team left Khartoum on Saturday for Darfur where it will spend at least three days meeting with officials and visiting camps and areas where displaced persons are located.
The minister conceded to the existence of human rights violations in the area of Darfur, which lives in extraordinary situation now but that these violations do not in any way tantamount to ethnic cleaning or genocide.
"If you ask me on whether there are human rights violation in Darfur or not, I would say yes there are but they could not go the level of ethnic cleansing or genocide.
Human rights violation in the sense of lack of medical treatment, of forcing people out of their homes, of lack of food and insecurity, these exist just like any other country, including the United State," Ismail said.
Meanwhile, the minister has accused some European countries of leading "a double standard" policy when it comes to the Sudan, turning a deaf ear to what is going on in Iraq and the occupied Arab territories.